If OP is anything like me, they 'manage' the old tabs by thinking "Oh that's neat I'll leave it open so I can come back to it' and...never do that.

I fall into this trap as well. My solution to mitigate my tab hoarding has been to set up a blank GitHub repo and use the discussions/issues to just continually post links, descriptions, and notes in a thread format.

Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with GitHub it’s all markdown-based so I can throw images, files and whatever else I need in a session in there to keep it all encompassing.

Ever thought of productizing that idea? Sort of a personal threaded wiki that you can send bookmarks to?

So you'd use git in a similar way you'd use obsidian, just with the ability to sync online and share easily/collaborate.

My solution is to shutdown my PCs every day.

I do this as well.

I have a Python script which I can use to kill all chrome.exe so that next time the machine boots, chrome offers me to restore the tabs which where open before the crash.

I only use this when I know that the tabs are really important and I need to continue using them the next day. Else Chrome starts with a single custom startpage which contains links and as well as views to Jira projects (like a to-do list via the Jira API). And during the day I bookmark all tabs I find important and clean up. But it's usually around 4 windows with each around 10 - 20 tabs which accumulate during the day, in addition to dedicated browser profiles which serve specific purposes, like email or developer consoles.

I do the same thing without Python. ctrl + shift + t opens previous tabs and windows.

Doesn't work for me, Firefox restores tabs from before restart. I could turn it off, but it invariably comes helpful for when Firefox (or the PC) crashes.

My current solution is that, through a stroke of luck and a lot of pent up frustration, I've managed to habituate the following behavior:

WHEN I notice I've been procrastinating for too long, OR I'm getting anxious about so many "open loops" in the browser, OR I lose track of specific tabs I know are open and spend more than two seconds looking for it, THEN I find the last Actually Important tab (usually somewhere between the third and the tenth from the left), right-click on it, select "close tabs to the right", and confirm the closure of 100-200 tabs.

I do this a few times on a typical week; because its habituated, I do it fast enough that the FOMO of "but I actually wanted to read that, and that, and that" doesn't have time to kick in.

I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront. It's simple but something I use many times every day.

feel free to try it out:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

I end up not managing it at all and it becomes a second brain. Links also rot when revisiting to recall info which is another problem. I use % in the address bar to find the tab what I'm looking for.

I like exhaustive deep dives so will explore as many sources as I can find, until my attention wanes, or I find a solution.

Have signed up for Readwise beta which will hopefully help me to add a layer to store/consume information before it info gets committed to Obsidian. Other link/article aggregators have not been successful for me as it just becomes another repository to manage.

Will have to look into sidebery, haven't seen that before!